A particularly relevant portion of the article talks about rituals: behaviors that athletes engage in--often unconsciously--to renew their concentration and refocus their mindset. From this perspective, what a trader does *between* trades is as important as what happens during trading. Successful traders will spend time away from the screen when their attention lags, pacing themselves during the day. That helps them stay market-focused when they are in front of the screen, rather than distracted by performance concerns.

I recently stressed implicit learning as a key to trading performance and biofeedback as useful in the regulation of mind and body. This regulation enables traders to sustain access to what they tacitly know. Intuition does not just come to traders; it has to be actively received. A large part of that reception is maintaining a clear mind with focused concentration. To the degree that traders are immersed in self-talk about markets--how much they've made, lost, should have made, shouldn't have lost--they are no longer immersed in the patterns that underlie trading decisions.

The HBR article is useful in pointing out that performers can train, not only for their competitive events, but for the space that occurs between competitions. We commonly focus on market setups; the key to success, however, might be setting ourselves up for the next trade..

About Me

Author of The Psychology of Trading (Wiley, 2003), Enhancing Trader Performance (Wiley, 2006), The Daily Trading Coach (Wiley, 2009), Trading Psychology 2.0 (Wiley, 2015), and Radical Renewal (2019) with an interest in using historical patterns in markets to find a trading edge. As a performance coach for portfolio managers and traders at financial organizations, I am also interested in performance enhancement among traders, drawing upon research from expert performers in various fields. I took a leave from blogging starting May, 2010 due to my role at a global macro hedge fund. Blogging resumed in February, 2014, along with regular posting to Twitter and StockTwits (@steenbab). I teach brief therapy as Teaching Professor at SUNY Upstate in Syracuse, with a particular emphasis of solution-focused "therapies for the mentally well". Co-editor of The Art and Science of Brief Psychotherapies (American Psychiatric Press, 2018). I don't offer coaching for individual traders, but welcome questions and comments at steenbab at aol dot com.